Belgium was enacted the most terrible frightfulness in the world; over
the whole land, mingled with the reek of candles carried in procession
and of incense burnt to celebrate a massacre, brooded the sultry miasma
of human blood and tears. On the one side flashed the savage sword of
Alva and the pitiless flame of the inquisitor Tapper; on the other were
arrayed, behind their dykes and walls, men resolved to win that freedom
which alone can give scope and nobility to life.

[Sidenote: The Intellectuals]

And in the melee those suffered most who would fain have been
bystanders, the humanists. Persecuted by both sides, the
intellectuals, who had once deserted the Reform now turned again to it
as the lesser of the two {255} evils. They would have been glad to
make terms with any church that would have left them in liberty, but
they found the whips of Calvin lighter than the scorpions of Philip.
Even those who, like Van Helmont, wished to defend the church and to
reconcile the Tridentine decrees with philosophy, found that their
labors brought them under suspicion and that what the church demanded
was not harmony of thought but abnegation of it.

The first act of the revolt may be said to be a secret compact, known
as the Compromise, [Sidenote: The Compromise, 1565] originally entered
into by twenty nobles at Brussels and soon joined by three hundred
other nobles elsewhere. The document signed by them denounced the
Edicts as surpassing the greatest recorded barbarity of tyrants and as
threatening the complete ruin of the country. To resist them the
signers promised each other mutual support. In this as in subsequent
developments the Calvinist minority took the lead, but was supported by
strong Catholic forces. Among the latter was the Prince of Orange, not
yet a Protestant. His conversion really made little difference in his
program; both before and after it he wanted tolerance or reconciliation
on Cassander's plan of compromise. He would have greatly liked to have
seen the Peace of Augsburg, now the public law of the Empire, extended
to the Low Countries, but this was made difficult even to advocate
because the Peace of Augsburg provided liberty only for the Lutheran
confession, whereas the majority of Protestants in the Netherlands were
now Calvinists. For the same reason little help could be expected from
the German princes, for the mutual animosity that was the curse of the
Protestant churches prevented their